Microsoft’s Bing has gained further by a marginal 0.4% in the search engine share in August, 2009 in the US Core Search Share. On the other hand, share of Google Search has come down marginally by about 0.1% during the same period. Yahoo’s share remains flat. Celebration time for Bing?
Not quite. Share of Bing is at 9.3% and that of Google Search is at 64.6% – so there is a volume difference of about 7 times or 700% between Bing and Google. Bing has a long way to go. In fact, at 19.3% share, even Yahoo! Search is about 100% more than Bing and the latter may find it difficult in the near future at least to beat even Yahoo. May be during the initial period after its launch, due to a lot of curiosity and positive media coverage (courtesy fat ad package of US$ 100 million?), Bing is showing some gains. But, the relevant question to consider is how soon it gets tired in this race to approach Google.
Alright, Bing may have a different presentation style or may have better results in some specific areas (such as, for example, search for hotels), but what about the vast number of remaining areas where Google has the clear edge by a vast-vast-vast margin? Then see, how fast is the updation of newly added web pages on Google – it is almost real-time; and this applies not only to the popular websites (which all search engines will update fast in any case) but also to smaller and/or lesser-known sites which are also updated in the search results by Google pretty fast. Bing takes days to update newly added web pages on lesser known sites – and, mind you, there are millions of such lesser known sites. So, if you have to compare Bing with Google, do not just compare their results for some popular sites only, but compare them also for less-common sites and less-common keywords. Also compare the quality as well as relevance of the 10 top results. Google is far better here as of now.
Then, what about the massive lead that Google has acquired over last decade of its monopoly in search engines during which period it has assimilated huge search data from all over the web? Bing has little to offer in that regard in order to be in a position to meaningfully compete with Google. Looks may be important, but ultimately it is the quality of the contents which matters when one has to analyze the performance of a search engine. And, Google remains my only favorite at the moment in this regard. Why me alone? It is the favorite search engine of two-thirds of netizens at the moment. And, this is not a small vote.
All this is not to suggest that Bing should not progress. On the contrary, by all means, it must progress. After all, a good competitor will make Google sit up and take notice and improve its search engine further. Competition is always good for the users.
So, while we must welcome Bing’s improvements in share of search results, at the same time we must also be conscious of the fact that it is still far away from being a tough competitor to Google which is the undisputed leader and preferred choice for searching the web as of now. It is not for nothing that Google has led the search engine market for last full decade in the Internet-age where things can change overnight.
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